With fleet management of vehicles, you have a lot of equipment and details to keep track of, like when your vehicles need maintenance and which staff members are driving which vehicle. All of these details can be extremely confusing when not tracked digitally. If you don’t already have a set of best practices to follow, here are some to help you get more organized.
1. Protect your employee’s devices
Cybersecurity for fleet maintenance teams is critical. The devices your workers use for work – especially your maintenance teams – should be protected against cybersecurity threats to the best of your ability. Cybersecurity is a serious issue and when you run a fleet operation, you’re dealing with multiple people who might not know what precautions to take.
Getting everyone on the same page with cybersecurity is important when your workforce uses their devices to access company accounts and networks. All it takes is one security incident for your company’s login information to get stolen. If an unauthorized user gets ahold of your company’s login information, you can end up dealing with a data breach or deleted data.
To protect your employee’s devices, the first thing you need to do is provide a company device that you can install specific antivirus software, and don’t allow anyone to use their personal device for work. You should also install software to prevent downloads and block social media sites for anyone who doesn’t work with social media.
2. Use fleet management software
Managing your fleet of vehicles will be much easier when you use digital software instead of manual methods. You might have some software already, but if it hasn’t been specifically designed for fleet management, you’re missing out. For example, fleet management software includes a system for tracking warranties, which saves some companies thousands of dollars every year.
It doesn’t make sense to use multiple software applications to manage your business. The more applications you have to use, the more disorganized you become. It’s inefficient because you have to switch between applications and the data from each application exists in a silo.
With fleet management software, you’ll have every component necessary to manage your fleet from top to bottom, including tracking warranties, inventory, and repairs.
3. Standardize your company operations
Perhaps the most critical best practice in any industry is having standardized operations. Without a standard way of doing everything, even small tasks, each person will do things how they feel is best, which may or may not be efficient and/or safe.
By standardizing your operations in every area, you’re giving your workforce a gift. Because they won’t need to think about anything. Once they memorize how everything should be done, it will be like muscle memory for them. When workers can get through the day on autopilot, they’ll be more efficient and less stressed out.
Standardization also eliminates the potential for bad judgment calls. For example, if a worker notices you have an extraordinary amount of a certain vehicle part, they might ignore the automatic prompt to order more. They might not know that extra parts were ordered intentionally to sell to another local business owner who was having trouble sourcing parts.
With the standardization of protocols, you can make sure workers never ignore system prompts for ordering, or if they’re unsure about something, make it company protocol to check in with upper management before making any decisions.
4. Pursue warranty reimbursements
Always pursue your warranty reimbursements when you have the chance. Your reimbursement opportunities can end up saving you thousands of dollars over time.
Take a simple warranty on a parts replacement. Say you have a fleet that consists of fourteen vehicles and they’re all under warranty. Now, say there’s a part you need to replace on all of them that would normally cost $550 per repair. At fourteen vehicles, you’d be looking at $7,700 in repairs. However, when you pursue your warranty claim for the repairs, the warranty covers the cost.
Now consider all the random things you might need to have repaired on your fleet of fourteen vehicles throughout the years. You could be looking at thousands of dollars per vehicle. So as long as they’re under warranty, it’s worth getting reimbursed.
5. Run your fleet as organized as possible
Organizing your day-to-day operations is the key to maintaining profitability and limiting avoidable loss. The more organized you are, the easier you’ll track expenses, repairs, and warrantable opportunities.
When you can get these three aspects of your business hyper-organized, you’ll be in a good place to start turning some serious profits.
